The modern worker, student, and home maker is increasingly inundated with tasks, reminders, notes, and the like, that one must organize and manage in order to successfully complete one's duties. Additionally, the modern person must be flexible and agile in one's approach to managing one's work to keep pace with the ever changing and demanding environment be it work, school, or home.
The increased volume of tasks, reminders, and notes and the like (“Action Items”) that a person must manage in the current, complex, rapidly changing environment has led many individuals, that work in accounting offices, go to school, or manage a household, to use traditional tools such as checklists or calendar appointments as methods to keep the growing list of Action Items under control and organized. These methods work well for individuals with Action Items that have need to be completed on or by a particular day or time, but at the same time, these methods are a bit clumsy in the shadow of the modern environment. Recreating a new checklist to accommodate frequent updates or mixing completed and incomplete Action Items on a single list can cause confusion and distract from the remaining Action Items which still need attention. Using calendar appointments is not much better, while Action Items on the current day get attention, any uncompleted Action Items from previous days are hopelessly left behind, unless one religiously engages in rescheduling all uncompleted Action Items at the end of every day. These methods leave a person spending a much greater portion of one's time than desired to simply manage the Action Items rather than actually taking action. Additionally, these methods are very personalized and local which works poorly to meet the collaborative or remote management needs often needed in the modern environment. The structure provided by these methods and the strong likelihood that one′ Action Items have to be completed on or by a particular calendar day or at a time make these methods difficult to abandon, however, these methods lack the flexibility and agility needed by most workers, students, and home makers in the modern environment.
Other workers and teams, more of the likes of software developers and engineers, have abandoned the above methods for the stated reasons and have moved to a more visual, agile, and less disciplined approach of task management by adding Action Items to Post-it Notes and placing these notes on whiteboards, walls panels, or inputting the same into spreadsheets or an online equivalent. This method is far more agile than the checklist and calendar appointment methods and allows Action Items to be moved around the whiteboard or spreadsheet to show the current status of each Action Item. Engineers and software developers work through the Action Items in an agile and rapid fashion matching the natural workflow as they work on unique Action Items which highly depend on the relationship between Action Items but have little dependence on the day of week or day of the month. Because it lacks a strong dependence on the calendar day, this agile method works poorly in structured accounting environments, traditional classrooms and home environments, in which Actions Items are common, recurring, and completion is highly dependent on a particular calendar day or time.
The modern worker, student, and homemaker is left with a no-win situation for managing tasks, reminders, and notes. These individuals must sacrifice either using the structured list and calendar appointments method or an unstructured visual and agile method neither of which fully satisfy the existing need of being both structured and agile.